Podcast Description

Organic vs paid social media content – do you know the difference for your business?

The combination of content creation and distribution is the key to success for many businesses, regardless of the industry.

You can (and should) create LOTS of content, but if you don’t get that content distributed and seen, your business will not grow.

In this podcast, I discuss the changes in organic content and how it has been used over the years. I also go over why it’s so important to use paid advertisements to get your content seen!

 

Podcast File

Social Media Content: Organic Vs. Paid Content Strategies

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Transcription

 

INTRODUCTION

Hey, podcast listeners. Welcome back to another episode of the Facebook Marketing Ninja podcast.

In this episode, Manuel covers the difference between paid and organic content strategies and why organic content is still very important. Don’t forget to subscribe and leave a comment if you like today’s episode.

 

Cash is oxygen

In 2014 which is basically when I started to learn about the Facebook advertising platform, a lot of brands were doing some incredible things organically and they built some powerful social media channels just ORGANICALLY.

At that point, there were a lot of pages that did not even need to invest money in advertising. That was something that was doable.

 

In 2014 the algorithm changed

Facebook needed to make money. They are a publicly-traded company. They do have investors, meaning that they are required to make money, or else they plummet and they stop growing. It’s what it is guys. I mean, they’re also running a business.

If you guys are here with me, you are running a business. You need to make money. If you don’t make money, guess what? You get shut down, right? The thing doesn’t operate anymore without income.

Cash is oxygen. Cash is life. You need it to keep on expanding. That’s just the way it is, right?

 

Facebook needed to make more money

What they did was they, for many years, invested heavily in capturing attention and they got billions of people. I mean usually, when you say billions you’re exaggerating, but not in this case.

They got billions of people to get obsessed about using the platform actively for their entertainment. Once they did that, they gave us advertisers and brands the ability to reach them. That’s what I’ve been doing since 2014.

I’ve been paying money through my:

• BRANDS
• CLIENTS

to Facebook so they can put my messages in front of them – in front of these people that are using the platform.

And, in 2014 it became something that was mandatory now. If you want it to grow in social media, if you wanted to have a following, if you wanted to be able to create an impact in the current environment, you have to give Facebook some money.

People were complaining. And while they were complaining, I was riding the wave, the advertising wave. And those are one of the things that I want to clarify with you guys today because it’s a very different thing to be a content creator versus being an advertiser. 

 

The Difference Between 

Content Creation and Distribution

“Content creation and advertising are two separate subjects.” That’s just the reality.

If you grab your phone or your camera or your video recording device or whatever it is that you have going on and you just record content all day long, I mean you can be recording content 16 hours a day.

I hear some people talking about, “Just do a lot of content. Just do a lot of content.” Sure, it’s important, but if you do content all day long, let’s say 16 hours a day for two years in a row, there is a likelihood that nobody will ever pay attention because you’re not figuring out a very important element to content creation.

 

 And that is

Distribution

of that content.

Those are two separate subjects.  It’s two separate arts. You need to know how to create content, how to talk to a camera, how to talk to a microphone, how to take pictures, how to write articles. You need to know all of that.

But now you also together with that need to learn how to distribute that, how to get that message in front of people so they can be engaged with your brand. So that’s something for you to keep in mind overall that it’s not only about content creation. Both elements are important.

If you don’t pay attention to both of them, you’re going to fail.

Let’s say that you get professional as an advertiser and you master the Facebook advertising platform and you’re a genius and you know how to use the Facebook Business Manager, you know how to use Instagram, you know how to advertise like a maniac.

You’re so damn good at it, but then you have a lack of content. Well, you’re also not going to make it guys, that’s just the reality.

 

Content…

…is going to be required for your ads to be able to eventually give you a positive return on the investment.

So you have to be able to get good at those things, both of them actively. And that’s what I talk about consistently. I want you guys to learn about content creation and I want you guys to learn about advertising that content, getting that content to be seen by many people out there.

 

Organic content

Just in case that you are pretty new in this advertising world, in case you are from another language and English is not your first language, I don’t know if you know what the word organic means. Organic simply means that in the advertising realm,

you are not investing dollars to get it seen by people. It’s occurring in an organic fashion.

 

Meaning that you are not putting

financial energy behind it.

 

That is organic content. If I have a Facebook page and I pull out the app, once I pull up that app, I open up the publishing option, the button, and I put something on it. Let’s say a picture. Let’s say a video. Let’s say, you know, I read an article, I read a post or whatever it is. If I publish that, that is going to go into my Facebook page organically. Let me tell you something guys.

 

If you understand the value of this,

you will use it consistently.

 

Remember, this is something new

FACEBOOK IS FREE for you to use and for me to use. How cool is it that you can have a media platform like Facebook, like Instagram, that you can simply pull it out and PUBLISH A MESSAGE FOR FREE?

Do you know that that’s something new in this world? It’s brand new like you never had the opportunity of grabbing a newspaper, a radio, a magazine, a television ad or something and putting it out there for free. You couldn’t do that.

This is a brand new phenomenon of this current world. Why are we complaining about the fact that we don’t have organic reach like we used to? It’s a FREE PUBLICATION! The fact that you have 2%, 8%, 10%, you should be celebrating that because at least you have something you can keep on doing it actively, right?

 

Growing Your Business Through Content Distribution

The point is that organic content is still really, really valuable, but you need to master distribution of that content, paid advertising for that content. You have to do it actively and efficiently.

 

And if you do this actively and efficiently

your business will eventually grow.

 

That organic content gets better and better and better along the way and more people see it.

That’s something that we saw through the social media channels that I’ve created from Dr. Berg to my channels, to my dad’s channels. The more that you put out there and the more consistent that your content gets, the more active that you show that you are, that feeds the algorithm.

So if you have a thousand followers and you get the content seen by let’s say a hundred people, you got a 10% organic reach overall. That’s what we got going on right now. We’ve got anywhere from two to 10% organic reach.

 

High and Low Organic Reach

One thing to note about this: The better your content is, the more that people like it, that higher organic reach you’re going to get overall. So if you have content that is being loved by people, that is being shared, liked, commented, is creating a lot of engagement, then people are going to engage with it, share it.

That’s going to help you find more people to share this content with. Organically, it is going to get a higher, higher reception overall.

 

If your content is not being liked by anybody, is not being accepted by anybody, nobody’s commented, nobody’s doing anything with it,

then the organic reach depletes.

 

It goes down dramatically and now you get penalized. And if you have a thousand people then you’re going to get, if you’re lucky, you’re going to get 20 people to see it – 2%, right?

That’s what we have when it comes to organic reach overall. But as you grow both in your advertising efforts and your content creation quantity of it, that organic reach is eventually going to snowball and continue to snowball.

I have an example. My content, right? I am going heavy on Facebook, on Instagram. I’m going heavy on YouTube. I’m going heavy on LinkedIn.

 

The effect of putting heavy content out there does not happen overnight.

This is the organic content, not paid advertising.

 

This takes a long time guys and you’ve got to keep on doing it.

It’s just like building a business. You’re going to keep on putting it out there and putting it out there and consistently putting it out there.

 

Find Out What Content You Should Create

Today we have let’s say the privilege and also the luck that we can create content very easily from cell phone devices to recording devices that we have all over the place to platforms that give you information about what your customers and potential customers are looking for.

One platform that I talked about several times before, if you want to find out what content you should create for your potential customers, your potential audience, you can go to a place like answerthepublic.com.

answerthepublic.com is a great place to find out what people are asking about your brand and you can create content about that because when you create content about that, people are going to slowly generate interest about it and it’s just going to grow.

Not only that, what you do with this organic content is you can now grab it and figure out which content is being accepted the best, which content is being liked the most by people and now you can put some advertising dollars behind it.

 

Let me get you ready for one thing!

This is important to understand. In 2014 the algorithm changed, organic content in Facebook plummeted, right? Overall, we went from having a 40% organic reach to now getting under 10% in many cases. Facebook started forcing advertisers to invest dollars to get their brands to be seen by people. That’s what happened in 2014.

In 2018 early last year, a year ago, Facebook also created a panic in the community of advertisers because they rolled out this update in which even Mark Zuckerberg came out and he talked about that. That what he wanted to do was go back to providing a family friend oriented platform in which content from friends and family had priority over content from brands and advertisers.

This created this enormous confusion in the advertising community which is good for us. I took advantage of that because when people were panicking, I was jumping all over that and I realized that it became a better opportunity for us because people thought that it was something that was damaging the platform.

What Facebook did was that they in 2018 started adjusting their algorithm to make sure that the organic content that people are posting, friends, family, and brands, that friends and families are senior over brands. So that meant that you as a brand, as an advertiser, now even more than in 2014 had no choice but to learn how to advertise on the platform.

The organic game of being able to create this incredible organic monster’s noble machine for your brand was over.

 

If you only depend on organic content, you are going to die!

That’s just what happened with this whole change in 2018. In my case, I kept on surviving. In my brand’s case, we kept on surviving because we focused on creating advertising monsters, meaning that we focused on giving money to Facebook so they can continue to help us find our customers.

Facebook was not going to change that algorithm. Remember, Facebook’s money comes directly from advertising. That’s how they make their dollars. Over 95% of Facebook’s revenue is advertisers like you and me that give them money to advertise on their platform.

 

Remember:

They are an actual publicly traded corporation, which means that they need to make money. Do you think that they are going to sacrifice the money that they’re making? No. Everything that they do, all the changes that they do, all the updates that they do, they do them to protect their User Experience so the user stays on the platform so that advertisers can advertise their products and services in it. Because if users jump off the platform, Facebook dies.

That’s what you guys got to understand. It’s important for them to have users feeling comfortable and happy with the platform being engaged. Trust me, they have done so and they have done so very well.

No matter what pandemonium we’re going through, no matter what noise, no matter what’s going on out there, guys, people are still actively using the platform. 2.4 billion people almost are using the platform actively every single month.

 

The numbers don’t lie

Facebook keeps on expanding and it keeps on being a power player, but you need to somehow understand that your brand and business has to carry with it a combination of organic content and paid advertising for that organic content – a combination of organic content with advertising. So you do have to understand the Facebook advertising platform.

In that platform, you’re going to understand Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and the Facebook world. Dominate Facebook Business Manager. Get good at it. Improve your ability to advertise on it. If you do so, your organic content is going to be more and more important every step of the way and you’re going to see more people seeing it, more people engaging, and more people overall participating and connecting with your brand.

Hey guys, I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode of the Facebook Ninja podcast. If you want to learn more advanced Ninja tactics to grow your business and master social media marketing, then sign up for the Manuel Suarez coaching program by heading over to our website, manuelsuarez.com/coaching.

 

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